It's been freakin cold for the past two days here at christchurch. it feels like winter again, though spring time is about to start, or has it started? cos before this, it's considered bloody warm already. it rained yesterday and my sister 's field trip with her coursemate to Arthur's Pass was cancelled half way through, because the road was blocked apparently, as it snowed there! how i wish i was there joining them. haha!
lately i went through these online communities which i have joined ages ago and i wonder when was the last time i was active in these online postings and stuff, looking back, i thought maybe time just passes by so lightning fast that now i'm already an adult, and there's a whole lot of stuff to keep myself occupied, 'occupied' as in keeping myself doing the same thing over and over again and without stopping for a while and think of the past. stop what you're doing now, think hard, think of ur life ten years back, have you been keeping in touch with your old pals? have you accomplished what you have planned then? are you on track for your next big thing?...
there is a range of instant messaging program which we all could use to keep in touch with friends, namely ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, AIM... u name it, they have it.. but one couldn't be bothered to send messages to everyone they have on their list ya? The answer is : Yes. I don't have the time to talk through icq, or anything these days, the same applies to everyone. I used to log on to ICQ very often back in the high school days, when everyone in class or even school chat online, and even form chat rooms to chat to each other, even after school! this makes me now wonder why the heck we all chat online then when we could have talked so much already in school? was there anything really necessary to chat about? hmm... yeah ppl could argue that in our generation, this icq thing was a real hit, i mean everyone's obsessed with it. everyone just don't wanna be left behind. i remembered then when a chatroom's full of ppl, everyone talks randomly to everyone. there wasn't a real issue to talk about though, what you wanted was the fun of it! there's no serious thing to discuss about. and later, the chatroom just becomes lesser and lesser, people just resort to instant messaging, sending those messages with the 'oh oh' sound (i bet you remember that!). at first they sound really cool, but then they became too annoying that people (at least i am one of them) just go to the settings and turn the shit off. ... and then one day , when i ( now this is what i experienced ) headed off to uk, this became a daily messaging tool, with the Yahoo Messenger gaining my attention as it offered Webcam service, i started using it to communicate with my sister in Kiwiland, and my parents in Malaysia... and the next big thing happened, Local Area Network was a new thing to me, large file sharing became popular, everyone just got addicted to it. downloading mp3s take seconds, music videos, divx movies and stuff, hey baby, it's such a fun to live on campus!... i had frens who own two computers and they just left their system on for 24/7, downloading animes ( which are jap cartoons.. dunno why they gain so much popularity though ) and burning cds , honestly speaking, the amount of cds they've burned so far could reach hundreds! this is no joke. and then after some time, i realised that msn was much cooler than Yahoo Messenger, the reason i stuck to Yahoo messenger before that was because i am a YahooMail user rather than Hotmail (nowadays i still prefer Yahoo Mail though)... What you see in msn messenger nowadays are way cooler than messenger. i guess i am attracted by , don't laugh at me, the smilies! yeah. it's true, that was the first thing i realised about the difference. tell me honestly, whose smilies look better? and then there was the webcam capability enabled in later versions, and that persuaded me enough to go for msn! .... it's obvious somehow when you sometimes ask your friends of their emails, what provider is normally used? hotmail.... but why? hotmail gives u 2mb of inbox space compared to Yahoo's 6 mb, and hotmail really sucked when it first came out, but it still is everyone's favorite email provider, i am still hesitating nowadays to just stick to hotmail and forget yahoomail... well, these are just my own opinions, no offence though. there are some other providers which are highly recommended.... lycos.com , mail.com just to name a few. but yahoomail and hotmail dominates the free email service ! icq? yeah, i have to say that nowadays i don't really use it anymore as they eat up my laptop's memory. moreover, it's too crowded in icq. when i first used it in high school, i only talked to my classmates. but as time progresses, the list gets longer and longer, if i'm not mistaken i have about 330 names in my list!! gosh... i hope i have all the time to keep in touch with everyone though, but i cant.... so i escaped ........ to msn, where there was no one in my list initially, then i kept adding ppl into my list and now, it's becoming like icq! i guess that's what we do nowadays, escaping from the chatting situation and still like to keep in touch, is there some program which we could only talk when we want to, and just offline when our mind tells it to without offending others? i guess no. what you see nowadays on these programs, be it icq, or yahoomessenger or msn, is that people would log on to them but appear away, or n/a, or busy, out to lunch? on the phone ??!! well well, you can just stay invisible if you like, but what's the whole point of it? logging on to them but not chatting at all? ironically, people do that very often, they just wanna get a sense of being 'online but not talking' .... that's what i do, and i find it irritating too myself... let's reflect on what these programs are all about... it's about being in the online community. if i give u a computer without internet connection, could u survive? no i don't think so. when you see ppl in busy mode, what do u do? message them? but u do know that they're busy, and they don't wanna offend you by not replying... so? send them a message anyway, they'll reply when they're not in busy mode later. but try to think, if they're in busy mode, ten person send them messages, imagine the windows clogging the whole task bar.... who's to blame?? u can't just reply all ur messages when you're bz ya... this is getting more and more messy with u being 'online but not talking'.... what do u do ??? i suggest you log off , and stay away from the program till you're completely free... i'm not being mean, but that's the way to solve the problem... :) life's like that, you're always faced with obstacles , how you clear them is a challenge, so is being 'online'..... welcome to my world. coffee, anyone?